Hi all,

I'm setting up a small debian lenny based cluster at home for as a 3d renderfarm.

I'm booting some bare MB+CPU+RAM over pxe from my new debian lenny fileserver. (kernel: 2.6.25-2-686)

I'm new to linux, i've been using mainly solaris and freebsd for the last decade.

My nodes are asus motherboards with a atheros 1e gigabit network card onboard.
I had to compile the driver module for these nics and it got installed as a kernel module. (on the server) (the driver source does'nt support compilation into kernel itself.)

I copied these to the my pxe nfs root.

The boot works, the node get's it's IP via dhcp after a pxe boot is started, and the kernel and initrd.img are loaded via tftp, however it gets stuck when trying to mount my root via nfs as the nic is not working,
since the driver is missing.

I guess i need to place my nic driver module in the initrd.img which i serve to the pxe clients, so it gets loaded.

I rebuilt my initrd.img using a 'update-initramfs -c -k 2.6.25-2-686
' but it's still not in there, i checked on the client in busybox and degziped/cpio'ed the new initrd.img on the server and it's not inside.

Can't seem to find any doco's on this, can anyone tell me how to place it inside and force the kernel to load it ?

Thanks,
Radiance

radiance,

From some researching, I don't think 'update-initramfs' changes your initrd image. An initramfs image and initrd image are two ways of booting Linux. You either use one or the other. You can check by going into /boot and looking for files like initrd-x.x.img. If you have files in there with 'initrd' pre-fixed to them, you probably use initrd's.

So, assuming your using initrd's, you need the 'mkinitrd' command with '--preload=<module>' option. Here's what it may look like for you:

You may even have to preload the NFS modules. the man page for mkinitrd may be useful to you as well.

Good Luck and let us know of your outcome!